The wealthy do not and never will send their children to an online university. Funny how no one ever mentions that.

I know semi-upper-middle-class people who are spending $80K per year to keep their kids in relatively elite private universities. Right now, an underlying premise is that their investment will somehow return value. And well it might. But these are extremely risky investments, for a number of reasons.

Among these reasons: one can imagine that the returns on investments of this type might be decreasingly measurable in monetary terms: If your kid studies medical-micro-bio but ends up an organic pear farmer on the Sacramento River out of conviction, what do you say? The choice might be rational, not so much because there are no opportunities, but because the opportunities aren't immediately commensurate with the new graduate's senses of adventure/exploration, competence, or social justice. What then?

(An aside: I used to know someone who administered a granting program to Sudanese university students, run by the government of Sudan. She was responsible for keeping tabs on the students. All rich kids. THEY would commonly come to the US but enroll in only online courses. Sort of a blended-learning model....;)

Only 33 percent of the freshmen who enter the University of Massachusetts, Boston, graduate within six years. Less than 41 percent graduate from the University of Montana, and 44 percent from the University of New Mexico. The economist Mark Schneider refers to colleges with such dropout rates as “failure factories,” and they are the norm.

Gilpin and Katz describe in exhausting (!) detail the impact of college completion on both an individual's wages over the course of a lifetime and on macro-scale increases in productivity (as GDP, basically).

Leonhardt goes a step further and suggests that: 1) Costs (tuition, etc) are key determinants of where kids go to school, with many students outside of the upper-income bracket ending up "under-matched," attending schools that aren't the best for which they are qualified; 2) state colleges and universities, which serve those students in families with non-elite wealth, are the worst offenders in terms of completion percentage.

It means that disparities in university education in the US contribute greatly to the growth of inequality. Or, to put it another way: the non-rich--by virtue of the inadequacy of institutions that are designed to serve them--are getting even less rich, which is to say, eventually they will be poor.